Friday, September 28, 2007

5 minutes for mom is having a drawing for a pink dyson. For each pink dyson that they sell they donate $40 to breast cancer research. A very worthy cause. Leave a comment in their comment section and the drawing is Monday, Otcober 1st.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

I ordered from shoebuy.com some shoes for us to wear hiking in Hawaii and I absolutely love them! I do wish that the women's came in black, but I guess the mermaid colors aren't too bad. All I know is that these shoes are comfortable and can go in the water as well.

I bought Em shoes there last year and I always get Junior's Robeez there as well. They ship fast and free and have easy returns as my mom found out. They usually put out a 20% coupon, or the above link will give you $10 off. Also if you use ebates.com you can get 10% back on your purchase.

Anyway, that's what I do to buy shoes these days, it beats dragging three children out and hearing them complain the entire time and then finding out that the store doesn't have their size anyway!

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

TripleE over at Oh! That's Going to Leave a Mark tagged me. I am supposed to reveal 7 things that most people don't know about me. I'll keep it clean since my mom reads this too, and I am betting my family will probably know most of these...

1. I was born in Sydney, Australia, and thankfully was NOT named Killara, the suburb that we lived in, like my mom wanted to. Thanks Dad! (My brother was disappointed I wasn't a boy named after him and my sister thought "Plantaxley" would have been a better choice. While my name is unusual, I gave my children three very normal names.)

2. I sailed from Florida to the Bahamas with a group (Sea Explorers) when I was 16. I don't know what my parents were thinking letting me go!

3. I love to run on the treadmill at the gym, but I have to count when I do it. Hmmm..maybe I am a little OCD.

4. I am terrified of roaches. I can handle spiders and stuff, but roaches....my skin crawls thinking about them.

5. I love to go to the dentist.

6. I have never been in a tanning booth.

7. I love fried gizzards with sour cream and now the girls eat them too. I also like okra and artichokes, but the taste of celery makes me sick.

I had a hard time with these as I am a pretty open book. My husband thinks it is weird that I make lists, that I use those dry erase boards to make more lists. He's just not use to trying to organize and coordinate for three children on his own.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

When I went to school, lunches were 75 cents for elementary students. I remember I would get three shiny quarters from my mom in the morning, put them into my black bookbag and trek of to school. I also remember losing them a lot. I would tell my teacher things like "My mom doesn't want me to eat because my Grandma is coming in town and we are going to have a big dinner" and other off the wall things. One time the teacher asked me if I had enough money and I assured her that my mom didn't want me to eat lunch.

Here on post, our school offers breakfast and the girls like to eat there in the mornings. They also allow you to check your child's account balance online to see if there is enough money in their account to cover their meals. I checked tonight and the girls should have the same amount of close to it. Ab's was considerably less. I pulled up what she had ordered to eat and one morning she ordered off the ala carte menu and had a luxurious breakfast (that was stuff I know she wouldn't eat) and spent $2.85! Yikes! Tomorrow morning we will be talking about what menu she can order off.

The school sent home a flyer last week advertising a free class tonight titled "How to preare our children and stay involved in their education during deployment...". I thought it would be a beneficial class for DH to take and he agreed so I signed him up.

I had a class to go to somewhere else so off he went with all three children in tow. And from our school with over a thousand kids, guess how many parents showed up......TWO (and that was including my husband)! I just don't get it. Maybe everyone thinks that they know everything there is to know about preparing for a deployment and staying involved? Maybe they are too busy? Don't care? Have better things to do? This will be DH's third deployment to Iraq and he did one to Bosnia for a year before kids, but it still doesn't get any easier. Every time our children have been different ages, at different schools and doing different things. I'd go to a dozen classes in the hopes that I could gain one idea from it to make my life or his life easier during this deployment.

Monday, September 24, 2007

The house I wanted to buy is under contract. Not that I know where we will be after this next deployment, but I still wanted it. Sigh.....

Junior went over the the outlaws today and I think that will be the last time for quite a while. They need to get rid of some dogs. With the puppies they have 8 dogs right now and it smells like they have a hundred. And I thought potty training children were messy....yikes! If I even had one ounce of desire for a dog (which I don't) it was squashed today by visiting over there. Junior had fun chasing the puppies and playing with them though.

Dh and I went to the gym tonight for a body step class. I absolutely love it, although I think my old class had better classes or I am just out of the loop with the new releases. (BTW the old gym called last week and offered me a good deal and I reminded them that I was happy over there and if they had offerend me the low prices they were offering now I would have stayed! About 3/4 of the way through class they came and got us because Junior threw up. Not sure if he did, or maybe it was his reflux (I have to remember to pick up his prescription tomorrow), or maybe he was sticking his hands down his throat--his latest trick, or he has a cold and if he coughs too much he will throw up. Hopefully it is nothing serious.

I'm not liking Dh's new job because he has to work late every day. I know it will be better once he is in Iraq though. We just want to spend as much time with him as we can before he does go.

I read a report the other day that our car--the Toyota Highlander--was rated one of the top 10 cars to own. It is supposed to last till over 200K. Anything has to be better than our Saturn! Actually I love our highlander though, especially since DH and the kids cleaned it out the other week.

I went to the volunteer orientation at the girls' school this afternoon. There are hundreds of kids at this school. Anyway, out of all these children only 6 parents, including me, have registered to volunteer. Are all schools like that? When the girls went to private school it seemed like almost all the parents were there for every function. This just seems like an awfully low number to me.

Abs got her new homework packet and I am supposed to write down how many minutes it takes her to read her reading assignment each night. So I timed her tonight and it took less than 20 seconds. I know she is a great reader, but the poem was really short. It took her about 10 minutes to choose what colors to use to color her pattern worksheet. Hard decisions you know!

Em is making an island in social studies in the shape of a book. They have to include all these different items in a legend. She gave her island five cities and then didn't want to connect them with roads. I told her she could use a train, but then she would need a station at each town so she went back to the road idea and tried to lower the amount of cities that she was using. I am not raising a city planner.

About Me

We have survived four year long deployments--one to Bosnia and three to Iraq. We have been married for almost 17 years and have three children--Em, Abs, and Junior. Gunner is currently deployed for the 5th time to Afghanistan. We are fast approaching the year mark, and then we will focus on the prize--retirement!